Blender 2.74 - open source 3D modeling, animation and rendering software

The Blender Foundation just released Blender 2.74 - http://www.blender.org/download/

The new viewport compositing features in Blender 2.74 add ambient occlusion and depth of field controls to Blender’s viewport, much as Viewport 2.0 did for Maya. The release also improves Blender’s hair dynamics.

• Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
• Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan datablocks better.
• Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
• Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
• A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to  sculpting painting, along with other improvements.
• Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
• Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more…

Cycles Render

Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise
Optimizations: black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements, many great memory optimizations
Nodes: new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, control texture space of one object by another.

User Interface

New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper
Outliner: orphaned Datablocks Mode was added for datablock management, now allows deleting of entire object hierachies, drag & drop objects to groups.
The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
Customizable camera safe areas

Modeling

Support for Custom Normals was added, and transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier.
Tools:

• UV handling for Edge/ Vertex Slide was improved
• new inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
• “Fit Camera View” now works for orthographic cameras as well
• new “Split Concave Faces” tool to ensure a convex geometry was added

Particles

Hair dynamics and editing tools were massively improved:

• Support for hair collision with meshes
• Simulation now happens using volumetric calculations for more realistic results
• Strand bending uses a more realistic approach
• Controlling of child hair shapes using curve widgets
• New “Spiral” kink mode to generate spirals at hair ends
• Toggle buttons for render and viewport visibility were added to the particle settings in the Properties Editor

Sculpting/Painting

Brushes/Strokes:

• Improvements to rake and random mapping
• Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments

Texture Painting:

• Support for dithering for painting on byte images
• A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills

Freestyle Non-photorealistic Rendering

A great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering was done.

Animation

Grease Pencil:

• New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, …
• Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with “Continuous Drawing”
• Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
• Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner

Other:

• Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
• Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
• Using a new “Follow” option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator

Game Engine

Physics:

• The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python
• Usability improvements

New option “Lock Z Velocity” to avoid micro-jumping

Add-ons

• A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
• Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
• POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
• FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
• New Python API functions

More Features

• .blend Files & Libraries: generation and saving of previews for materials, textures, lamps, world and images datablocks.
• Background images can now be rotated and flipped.
• Compositing: Plane Track Deform, Multilayer EXR nodes improved; memory usage optimization.
• Sequencer: Slip tool, Setting proxies improved; preview individual strips (feature back from Blender 2.4x)
• Added gamma node support for Blender Internal
• Added MotionTracking operator to filter tracks based on how smooth their motion is
• Many other small Improvements

Feature Videos

For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.

Bug Fixes

In addition to the new features, hundreds of bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

The story of Paris-8 University going for Krita, Blender, Natron - Open Source CG software

In the last years Blender and now Krita had evolved on a steady pace which proved to be an attractor for newcomers in CG industry.

Alexandre Prokoudine has posted an interesting article about the switch to open source software at Paris 8 University:
http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-complete-story-of-paris-8-university-going-for-krita-blender-natron

Let's hope it will be a serious push in development and will enhance the communication between coders and artists.
It's important to have an efficient workflow and the right tools with fast results.

An experimental short film named "The Desert of Sonora" ("Le Désert Du Sonora"). 

Blender 2.73 - new version of the 3d modeling, animation and rendering software

Blender is a professional free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. Alongside the modeling features it also has an integrated game engine.

 List of improvements for the new version of Blender 2.73:

• Several Cycles Rendering updates, improvements and new features, support for GeForce 9xx GPUs.
• New fullscreen mode, improved Pie Menus, 3D View can now display the world background.
• Knife-tool now allows freehand smart cuts, and more improvements were made in selection tools, Bevel Modifier and Shapekeys.
• Unwrapping UVs was improved, strength is now enabled for Grab and Snake Hook brushes, better visual feedback mode for painting with masks.
• Sequencer now can show a backdrop, strips can be snapped to others along with other improvements.
• Freestyle NPR Rendering has a new SVG exporter add-on, along with other improvements.
• Grease Pencil had a major update, it is now possible to edit and animate strokes! New draw styles, and imporvements in user interface.

• Collada Importer was updated, improving the compatibility with other software’s bone concepts.
• Add-ons: FBX improved importing/exporting armatures, some Python API changes  could need some Add-ons to be updated!
• As usual several other minor updates and improvements, and lot of bugfixing also in this release.

Cycles Render

• Volumes can now be rendered if the camera is inside them
• Support for cubic voxels interpolations to avoid artifacts especially on low resolution smoke simulations
• Support for GeForce 9xx GPUs
• Faster rendering of homogeneous volumes
• Improved rendering with area lights
• Viewport specularity

User Interface

• New Fullscreen mode displays an environment without any buttons or other “annoying” user interface elements
• A number of Input Method Editors (IMEs) are now supported for complex non-latin character input (widely used in east-Asia)
• Pie Menus are now using a confirm threshold
• Pie Menus can now contain nested Pie Menus
• The 3D View has a new option to display the world background

Modeling

The Knife-tool now allows freehand cuts drawing and closing of cut-loops via double click. Selection during modeling has been improved by adding the ability to select similar regions, plus the select more/less function has gotten the option to skip adjacent faces. A few other improvements were made, like for the Bevel Modifier, Shapekeys

Sculpting / Painting

Unwrapping UVs was improved by using a simpler unwrap method. Numerical input is supported for changing brush size, detail size and strength. The latter one can now also be changed for Grab and Snake Hook brushes. When painting with masks, the face-mask edges are hidden to give proper visual feedback of what you are painting on.

Sequencer

Similar to the Compositor, an option to show the current frame as a backdrop has been added. Strips can be snapped to others by pressing the G key while moving them and their content can be moved independently of the strip itself (S). A few minor things were also made, such as an option to toggle all waveforms on/off, or drawing of meta-strip range while editing them.

Freestyle Non-photorealistic Rendering

The non-photorealistic render engine Freestyle got a new SVG exporter, implemented as an add-on. It’s now also possible to cache view maps and a few more options for chain selection and chain sorting were added.

Animation

The Grease Pencil was given a major update. As a result, it is now possible to edit and animate strokes! There are new ways to draw styles, like filled stroke interiors, volumetric strokes, etc. The Grease Pencil’s user interface (which is now completely defined via Python) has been improved as well, plus two quick access pie menus were created for it. Besides from the Grease Pencil update, there are some other minor improvements regarding animation.

Add-ons

Some updates were made for the Collada Importer. Compatibility of Blender bones to other software’s bone concepts was made better and the problems with “Leaf Bones” and that Collada isn’t aware of Blenders connection system between bones were fixed.
The FBX Add-on now uses some advanced handling/tweaking options for importing and exporting armatures. To Add-on developers: Some changes were made to the Python API, make sure to check them out and update your Add-ons if necessary!

More Features

Several optimizations: mesh deform modifier now uses SSE2 with multi-threading, compositor’s gaussian blur node implemented in OpenCL, vertex parent optimized for a few cases. In 3D View added GLSL specular transparency support for Blender internal materials, and support for specular highlights in cycles materials. Motion Tracking predictive tracking has been implemented now, enabled by default and doing magic under the curtain. Added shortcuts for masks and tracks copy-paste operators.

Download link: http://www.blender.org/download/

Blender 2.71 Released

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.71.
Much awaited new features for Cycles renderer include deformation motion blur, fire/smoke and volume rendering and a baking API. User interface now allows for draggable popups and resizable preview widgets. Animation has new interpolation types with “easing equations” presets.  Modeling now allows to “split normals” and Sculpting/Painting has new HSL color wheel and constant detail in dyntopo. Game development now allows deactivating logic bricks, multi-threaded animations, cast only materials and  “unlimited” action layers.  Freestyle NPR rendering has a new textured strokes feature, along with line sorting options.

Cycles Render

Deforming meshes, such as animated characters including hair, can now be motion blurred. Initial support for rendering fire and smoke is now available. Baking is now supported for Cycles! Volume Rendering branched path tracing now renders direct lighting for volumes with less noise but longer render time per sample. Overall render time for the same noise level should be reduced in most cases. Several generic and CPU optimizations. The Branched Path integrator now samples all lights for indirect bounces, instead of picking one. Nodes and CUDA improvements.

User interface

New brush previews for the Texture Paint mode. OpenGL Render options moved inside the Info Editor -> Render menu, among the OpenGL Render / Animation operators, consistent for Blender Internal and Cycles. Dragging popups by their title area is now possible. Material, texture, etc. preview widgets are now resizable.

Animation

Added support for a number of new interpolation types, that define a number of “easing equations” which reduce the amount of manual work to achieve certain common effects. F-Curves speedups and fixes, also for Drivers, Armatures, Constraints. Transform constraint modified, so the mapping factors get valid units which, unfortunately, brings compatibility issues with older files. Several fixes and improvements to many animation editors and tools.

Modeling

New “split normals” to draw smooth/sharp edges/faces in the 3DView, and both Cycles and BI renderers, replaces the old AutoSmooth/Angle settings for BI. Set edges smooth/sharp moved in the Shading panel of 3DView tools, new smooth/sharp vertices tools.

Sculpting/Painting

Added support for HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) based color wheel, which allows easy selection of color tints and shades of a certain color and colors have similar intensity on a given lightness. Also, added support in dyntopo sculpting for constant detail, a tool to help maintain the same level of detail across the mesh.

Game Development

New checkbox to deactivate sensors, controllers or actuators is added. It is useful during the game development phase to avoid delete any logic brick if you want to test something new. Skeletal mesh and shape key animations are now multi-threaded. Cast Only material option for shadows is now supported in Game Engine, and now “Unlimited” Action Layers are available.

Freestyle NPR Rendering

Added support for textured strokes,  one of long-awaited missing features: textures applied to Freestyle line behave much like Blender’s classic shading system, for stacking order, coordinate mapping and diffuse/alpha mapping with blending options. Style modules based on the Freestyle Python API can also make use of textures. Line styles now have a set of new options for sorting to rearrange the stacking order of lines.

More Features

New Bevel Factor Mapping allows to control the relation between bevel factors and the rendered start and end point of a beveled spline. Motion Tracking new distortion model “Division Model”  defines high distortion with only 2 parameters, much better for cameras with high distortion, such as GoPro with fisheye lenses. Main change in masking module was support of asymmetric and free handles

Feature Videos

For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.

Download link: http://www.blender.org/download/

3D with Blender 2.70

After two release candidates, the Blender Foundation has now released Blender 2.70
New features include initial support for volumetrics in Cycles, and faster rendering of hair and textures. The motion tracker now supports weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking. For mesh modeling there are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers, along with more control in the bevel tool. The game engine now supports object levels of detail.
The first results from the new user interface project are also in this release, with dozens of changes to make the interface more consistent and powerful. This is also the first release of the multithreaded dependency graph, which makes modifier and constraint evaluation faster in scenes with multiple objects.

Cycles Rendering

Cycles now has initial support for volume rendering including emission, absorption and scattering. Volume rendering can be used to render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone.
CPU rendering performance was improved, particularly for hair, textures and Open Shading Language.

Motion Tracker

Trackers can now be weighted, to keep the result stable as feature disappear or become difficult to track. The plane track workflow was improved to be easier to control. Automatic feature detection was made more robust using a new detector algorithm.

  User Interface

The toolbar now has tabs to organize tools in categories. Multiple buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips, buttons, menus and more.

Modeling

The Laplacian Deform modifier was added to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface, and a new wireframe modifier allows you transform your mesh into a wireframe representation. The boolean modifier now supports ngons, and there are improvements to the bevel, screw and triangulate modifiers.
The bevel tool now offers more control over the bevel profile and results, and the knife tool was improved as well.

Threaded Dependency Graph

An important change that happened under the hood is the threaded dependency graph. This means that object modifiers and constraints, among other things, can now be computed with multiple threads taking advantage of multicore processors. This will be most noticeable with scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers. This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more powerful.

Game Development

The Blender game engine now supports discrete level of detail for meshes. For game developers, support for working with Photoshop PSD files has been added.
A new view navigation walk mode has been added, which has a control scheme as typically found in first person shooter games. This can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game.

Freestyle NPR Rendering

The Freestyle Python API is an essential part that makes it a highly programmable NPR rendering engine. This API has been reorganized.

More Features

Many small changes and features were done all over Blender. Some notable new feature are normalized display for FCurves, derivative map baking, baking to vertex colors, better visualization of masks and control over mask filling, gravity option for sculpting, negative texture values to support vector displacement and a Lamp Data shading node to create more customized NPR shaders.



Download link: http://www.blender.org/download/

Blender Foundation - Gooseberry Open Movie Project

2014 and 2015 are going to be great years for Blender! Ton Roosendaal shared some plans - Gooseberry Open Movie Project:

• EU funding of €220,000 per year (with luck for two years).
• The launch of Project Gooseberry, the new Blender Institute open movie (a teaser website is now live).
• A list of projects and tools – many in the content/asset management and collaboration area.
• A list of full time and part time employees – the team is growing!

In the past 6 months, I’ve only had time for a handful of tiny commits to the Blender code. As much as I love coding and work on Blender itself, I’m also quite useful for other tasks – especially to help the Blender project to grow, become more professional and to get more developers on board.
Blender has grown as a community and volunteering project very well in the past decade, but the current user demands and our ambitions also require that we need more full-time developers on board. The past Open Movies have helped with that, and last year the Development Fund and gifts from sponsors allowed us to hire more people as well.

Using Blender NLE video editor

Brief tutorial (23 minutes) by Paul Caggegi that explains the basics of video editing, and shows you how to set up Blender as a Non Linear Editor. A .blend file with the windows layout and a key configuration file are available for download via the blog post.


Adding transitions

Blender 2.69

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.69 (3D computer graphics software).
More about Blender http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

FBX import is now supported, along with improved export. New mesh modeling tools were added and existing ones improved. Cycles subsurface scattering and hair shading were improved, along with the addition of a new sky model, shading nodes and tone mapping in the viewport. The motion tracker now supports plane tracking, to track and replace flat objects in footage.

We have been testing this final release using three 'release candidates'. The official release is now available, published October 30th 2013.